


The Amazing Adventures of Hat Guy and the Girl Who Stole His Hat

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: xkcd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:23:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1626536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not all fun and games, being an evil dude in an evil hat. Except, it kind of is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Amazing Adventures of Hat Guy and the Girl Who Stole His Hat

**Author's Note:**

> Written for numinicious

 

 

She buys him a hat. It explodes.

He buys her a journal. It disintegrates.

They rent a car. Strangely enough, nothing happens to it. They take turns driving, they take turns off the highway at whim. They visit Disneyland, they follow the route of old Route 66, they have their picture taken with the World's Largest Office Chair. 

(In Ohio, every computer bluescreens simultaneously; in Colorado, all the stoplights are stuck on green. In Anaheim, "It's a Small World After All" begins to sound suspiciously like "Long Live Our Soviet Motherland".)

After that, they hit the road again. They eat a lot of cheesecake and commit a lot of petty crime; they put the radio on and blaspheme to Christian rock; they steal from the rich and give it to the International House of Pancakes. On the side of the road somewhere, with tarmac stretching for miles in either direction and no one else in sight, they get out of the car and sit on the hood and kiss. They don't write postcards.

*

In Phoenix, Arizona, they set up shop in a mall. Hat Guy grabs the nearest kid, straps him in and presses the button.

"Jimmy!" howls the kid's mom. "You get down from that jetpack right now!"

"Make me!" yells back the kid. He's grinning.

Pretty soon a queue is building up. No adults allowed, is the only rule. One of the ten-year-olds figures out how to touch the ceiling and the line just gets longer and longer.

Hat Guy's girlfriend looks at him, looks at the child hovering below the roof, and inclines her head at the button marked "Off". _We could...?_

He shakes his head, shrugs. _Lawsuits._

The kids have to be talked down at closing time, and there's a nice stack of dollar bills in the hat (not that he took it off). And then there's just the empty mall, and the quiet night, and they somersault slowly together through clear and glorious space.

*

They spend a month living in a Pasadena basement. It's a short-term thing, until they get enough money to move on. They wait tables, and go around wearing signs saying "Will Fix Computer For Food", and sometimes, when yet another guy says something about girl geeks or girl gamers or girl anything, they get a bit of extra cash when they promise not to tell anyone how far up his ass the stiletto went. 

The main drawback of the basement is that someone else has the room upstairs, and the walls and ceiling are thin, so it's hard to get any privacy. They try playing music, first. It doesn't really work; the guy upstairs bangs on his floor and yells, "I don't care what you do! Even with the silk scarves and the pinwheel! Just do it _quietly_!" 

Then they shut down the machine in the corner of the room and reboot in Vista. The cooling fan roars. Hat Guy still whimpers after that, but no one notices.

*

On November 4th, 2008, a Mr. Michael Long from Chattanooga goes to do his patriotic duty and cast his vote for Senator John McCain. Unfortunately, when he touches the lever, a considerable percentage of the yearly output of the Tennessee Valley Authority discharges into his fingers and he is taken to the hospital with small sparks fizzing out of his ears. In Austin, Texas, a Mrs. Edith Stoppard tries to do something similar; her vote is cast without a hitch, but she goes home to a special delivery courtesy of the United States Postal Service, which turns out to be Rick Astley in a box. Lawyers in Florida get fruit baskets or machetes, depending, and in California there are a lot of write-ins for "Doctorow, C., Esq."

Hat Guy is at Cape Cod as night falls, right at the tip. The British aren't coming, but if they were, he'd be ready. He's wrapped up against the cold, watching the light flickering across the water and the light of the laptop screen flicker over his girlfriend's face. They've been out there some time when she looks up, and smiles.

*

In late December, they stop at a Christmas-tree lot in the Midwest somewhere. It's bitterly cold, and the man selling Christmas trees is obscenely cheerful, singing snatches of anodyne carols at his shivering customers, all of whom clearly want to just get the tree and get the hell out without lingering for pleasantries. 

Hat Guy tends to be thoughtful about this sort of thing. His girlfriend buys a tree and loads it into the back of their pick-up truck while he thinks about it. And then he's sitting in the back, laptop open on his knees, typing furiously, while she ties the tree securely down with long lengths of rope. (They stole it from the World's Strongest Man Contest in Utah; the winner ended up trying to pull a truck with the help of his teeth and twelve feet of liquorice candy.)

And then something happens. Hat Guy grins as the next couple step up to pay for their tree, and the man tries to charge their card; it's declined. It's declined again. The third time, it goes through: it charges them $0.00, and the man, singing 'Good King Wenceslas', doesn't notice.

They sit there a few minutes, watching the people move away with their gratis greenery, and then they grin at each other and she starts the engine. They hit the road and pick up speed, the tree rocking back and forth in the ropes, and it's a cold December afternoon and there's barely anyone else on the roads, with the fields stretching bleak and barren all around. 

" _You're_ my dearest darling Danish," she says, grinning.

"And you're my lovely cutie pie!" 

They hit the speed limit and keep on going into the pinks and greys of the sunset, a little pixellated towards the edges, and they're laughing fit to kill as they head out towards the coming down of the sky.

 


End file.
